An Inconvenient Truth

'Probably the scariest movie you'll see this year.'

They're not wrong.
I was so absorbed, I forgot to eat the M&Ms I'd bought.

This documentary is basically a slideshow presentation (quite an engaging one) that Al Gore has been giving over the last 20 years or so, interspersed with a few excerpts from his life, anecdotes and quotes from television appearances.

And yet.....it's one of the most compelling things I've ever seen. I used my new unlimited card, on which I am doing a very good impression of Dr Zoidberg. I mention this because Al Gore uses a scene from Futurama to explain global warming. He doesn't spend long on it, he doesn't pander to his audience. What he does do is show that humans are having an effect on their climate, that this effect is progressive and that politicians (particularly American ones) don't seem to be in any rush to solve the problem.

There is so much that he covers, in an engaging manner, that it's hard to summarise this film in a short review, and I don't want to tell you the whole story, because he does it so much better than I ever could. Really, you should go and see this yourselves. Hell, everyone should see this film.

But there are three key points that really stood out for me.

One was him on the cherry picker, having to manually extend a graph of CO2 and temperature, because it wouldn't fit on the huge projection screen.

Another was him showing the graph of car efficiency over time, starting in the 1960s. European cars all get much more efficient over time. I'm not kidding when I say that the US car line barely rises. Then he shows that the line politicians have that "Chinese cars could flood our market if we made our cars more efficient (and therefore more expensive)" is wrong, since US cars can't be sold in China (or that many places outside the US) because they don't meet the emission standards.

And the third was him showing how much the sea level will change if even half of the Greenland ice shelf collapsed.

This film probably won't tell you much that you didn't already know. But it's presented in such an energetic and engaging manner, that it really is very watchable. As I said I completely forgot my M&Ms and didn't even realise I was hungry until I left the cinema.

Score: A. I've already asked Play.com to notify me when this becomes available on DVD and I've already placed an order for the book.

OQ: We have everything we need [to solve the climate crisis] except the political will.